It is rare to read an autobiography which balances acerbic, almost visceral, anger with moments of genuine tenderness and affection ... The tone is cleverly nuanced, with a patina of adult self-awareness over the real, or reconstructed, memories ... What makes this stratospherically better than most childhood memoirs is the searing anger about injustice that burns through the book.
The language crackles ... Much of the memoir is knockabout and great fun. Paterson clearly relishes his day release from the ivory tower. Sometimes perhaps too much ... A different tone kicks in when Paterson gets to the "acute adolescent schizophrenic episode" that saw him hospitalised for four months as a teenager. This is some of the best writing on mental health I have ever read.
Paterson’s prose style is resolutely colloquial ... the effort to describe the music – folk and pop and jazz – that he loved as an adolescent leads him into the book’s most rapt and heartfelt passages.
Laugh-out-loud funny ... The strength of this memoir lies in Paterson’s range of verbal pyrotechnics allowing him to light upon serious themes with devastating accuracy ... Combative yet compassionate, entertaining yet undeceived, Toy Fights recognises the importance of not being too earnest, and is wholly authentic for it.
Toy Fights is rich in characters, wonderfully detailed, often very funny ... There are some odd, jarring and reactionary footnotes too ... It’s disappointing when there’s so much to love here.
There is something Joycean in how Paterson destabilizes the voice ... This personal trench is the crux of Toy Fights, which should probably have finished shortly after. Instead, the last fifty pages follow Paterson on the pub, club and wedding circuit with a number of bands, where the lead guitarist’s vice of self-indulgence starts to infect his prose ... I would add that a book is a joy to review when it is a joy to quote, and on a verbal if not a structural level, Toy Fights is a work of dazzling craft.
In this memoir his language is often at its most colloquial when he is being most serious, a contrast he negotiates to great effect ... There is a lived-in specificity to his observations ... His experience of the mental health ward, which he is able to recall with extraordinary detail, is a poignant and uncomfortable account in equal measure, but also serves to accentuate the weaker points of this memoir – specifically, its petty excursus on identity politics.
Like Paterson’s poetry, Toy Fights constantly doubles back on itself and questions its ability to produce meaning ... Toy Fights has no expectations and makes no demands. It knows there’s no guarantee that it will connect with readers, and that it has flaws and blind spots. As I’ve tried to suggest, it doesn’t just say these things—it embraces them and makes them core principles.
Paterson's wizardry with language and description, and long, winding sentences make for sumptuous evocative passages that are often hilarious and a pure pleasure to read ... The book lacks the compelling forward thrust of many contemporary memoirs that focus around a conflict or struggle to overcome. But the captivating immersion into Paterson's 1970s and 1980s childhood in Scotland, filtered through his wise and witty commentary as he peers back in time, and the poetic marvel of his language makes every chapter richly textured and a joy to read.
